Security Analysis on Tangle-based Blockchain through Simulation
This work addresses security vulnerabilities for developers and users of DAG-based blockchain systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Tangle structures.
The paper tackles security risks in Tangle-based blockchains by constructing and evaluating three attack types (parasite, double spending, and hybrid) through simulation, providing the first comprehensive security analysis in this area.
The Tangle-based structure becomes one of the most promising solutions when designing DAG-based blockchain systems. The approach improves the scalability by directly confirming multiple transactions in parallel instead of single blocks in linear. However, the performance gain may bring potential security risks. In this paper, we construct three types of attacks with comprehensive evaluations, namely parasite attack (PS), double spending attack (DS), and hybrid attack (HB). To achieve that, we deconstruct the Tangle-based projects (e.g. IOTA) and abstract the main components to rebuild a simple but flexible network for the simulation. Then, we informally define three smallest actions to build up the attack strategies layer by layer. Based on that, we provide analyses to evaluate different types of attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to provide a comprehensive security analysis of Tangle-based blockchains.